GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THE SCOPE OF ETHICS 167
ethical judgments are judgments of value. They arc, in
other words, judgments
to the effect that so and so is
desirable, or that so and so ought to be done; desirable,
that is to say, for its own sake, obligatory just because there
is moral obligation. To say that a thing is desirable for
its own sake, or to say that it is obligatory just because
there is moral obligation, is to imply that no reason can
be given for regarding it as desirable or as obligatory.
Words commonly used to express the property of incommunicability
which belongs to a truth of which we
are convinced but our conviction of which we cannot
communicate, which is a property of a fact that we
know but our knowledge of which we cannot demon*
strate, are "absolute", "ultimate" and "unique". Now
judgments to the effect that something is absolute,
ultimate and unique are, it is said, entailed every time we
make a statement involving an ethical term, and they
are entailed because the statement implies in the last
resort the existence of this something. Let us suppose
that we make a statement containing an ethical term,,
the statement that so and so is good. Now the word
"good" is usually employed in an instrumental sense; a
thing called "good" is, that is to say, usually so called
because it is " good " for something. Thus poison gas is
" good " for keeping enemy infants permanently quiet ; jemmies
are "good" for burglarious enterprises; bad men in
hell are "good " for keeping good men out of hell ; Guinness
is "good" for you, and so on. Let us consider what is
entailed by any one such statement, quinine, we will
saY> is " good ". Good for what? Good for fever. Quinine
helps, in other words, to reduce fever; but why reduce
fever? Because fever is a disease. But why not be diseased?
Because health is better than disease. Why is health better
than disease? At this point we may refuse to answer;
we just see, we may say, that health is better than disease,
and that is all there is to say about it. But in saying "we
just see" health to be better than disease, we are absolving
ourselves from the necessity of saying why we see it to be so.